Peter Scott

Peter Scott has been working in the field of software development since 1981. An alumnus of St. John's College, Cambridge University, England, he has worked for institutions as diverse as the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles and the Royal Greenwich Observatory in Britain. In 1983 he co-founded MegaGraphics of Camarillo, CA, and successfully led the creation of their first major product as Vice President of Software Development.

The bulk of his experience was gained as a computer scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, CA. As part of the Navigation Software Development Group (which is responsible for the pinpoint targeting of spacecraft over hundreds of millions of miles), he analyzed requirements and developed dozens of powerful packages ranging from data visualization tools to distributed data archival systems.

Then, as part of the group that provides distributed computing infrastructure to the lab, he was responsible for the development and deployment of systems managing customer interfaces for information systems such as file storage and authentication, for the entire laboratory.

In 1999, he started his own business providing Perl training and development, consulting on enterprise infrastructure, and large system development. He was the primary author on the book "Perl Debugged," on Perl language debugging techniques, published by Addison Wesley in March, 2001, and the sole author of "Perl Medic", on Perl maintenance, published by Addison Wesley in 2004.

He has worked extensively since then on enterprise architecture and identity management.

His professional speaking credits include papers presented at the Open Source Conference, YAPC, Digital Equipment Computer Users Society symposia, Usenix LISA conferences, and the 2002 Perl Whirl in the Caribbean. He is the founder of his local Perl users group.

He currently lives in the Pacific Northwest with his wife Grace, a chatty 10 year old Congo African Grey parrot named "Archie", and two cats named "Spanky" and "Darla".